“Los Angeles is 72 suburbs in search of a city.” —Dorothy Parker

I awoke this morning, as I often do, in a cold sweat of existential dread, cucked and dwarfed by the infinite. The universe echoed inside of me: thousands of years from now, when future steps on the evolutionary ladder are dusting off the remains of our species, what will survive from this current moment in time? Will the Biennale in Venice, the world’s favorite sinking city, and all the art world politics and geopolitics and junior high politics it entails be etched into some grand canon, or will they be washed away and forgotten with the rising tides? Is anything from these perennial End Times indelible on a spectrum that stretches to the end of history? I got out of bed and went to work.

A few weeks ago, Pilar Zeta and I visited the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, where on a clear day, one can almost see Venice, California, with his back turned to Francis Bacon’s Three Studies of Lucian Freud (1969). (Pilar is a very tiny Argentinian artist who, perhaps to compensate, creates monumental marble installations at places that have been around for centuries, if not millennia, like the pyramids of Giza, the Place du Louvre in Paris, and the sands of the beaches in Miami, to name a few). The sheer scale and density of LACMA’s brutalist, Peter Zumthor-designed building has a gravity that pulls my heart from its chest. Approaching the structure on foot immediately brought to mind my first experience with the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City in that no photo is able to accurately portray its incomparable scale, its awesome and humbling power over all who bear witness. It is a middle finger to God for housing human consciousness within a frail skin bag; the immense mass conveys life eternal.

The museum is a man-made leviathan loudly proclaiming its triumph over time, space, and Wilshire Boulevard. Twenty-plus years in the making, Zumthor’s pièce de résistance is a nod toward immortality and Los Angeles as a cultural hub FOREVER.

Pilar and I agreed that it was a fitting setting, then, for a collection of galleries with the audacious mission of encapsulating the essence of the entirety of art. Even with the weight of the massive cement walls all around us, the vibes-based curation allowed us to choose our own adventure over the whole of the globe in a way that felt light and freeing. It challenges passersby to find a throughline from the Egyptian mummies to Raymond Loewy’s Studebaker Avanti (1961) to Todd Gray’s thirty-seven foot visual poem for Afrofuturist pioneer Octavia E. Butler. It is not a labyrinth in which one leaves breadcrumbs and retraces steps, as a huge part of the fun is forging paths and finding novel contexts for works that may or may not have once been familiar. Though the building itself exudes PERMANENCE, the joy of exploring its innards emerges from discovering new connections between the contemporary and history from ancient to recent, forgetting them, then developing new possible trails of inspiration and origin. The layout is an ode to historical multiplicity.

“I can’t wait to get lost here again the next time I’m in town,” Pilar said, before she left for Venice, Italy, to show one of her monumental marble installations.

While Mirror Gate II (2026), her Venetian contribution, weighs dozens of tons, it has actually proven quite mobile. The piece was conceived in the quarries of Egypt, first actualized in Paris, then transported to Venice. Her mammoth stones convey a solid, ineffaceable foundation for thought and spirituality, but they are transient by way of human desire. Pilar’s practice moves mountains.

And when mountains, monoliths, and museums are transportable, they are also impermanent. Which brings me back to this morning’s existential dread. Too many glorious peaks of the Los Angeles art community moved out of our realm of existence in recent months. I am grateful to have had meaningful moments with L (formerly Laz/Lazaros), Jasmine Little, Celeste Dupuy-Spencer, and Hilde Lynn Helphenstein while they were standing tall, but they were fleeting, too brief. Our world feels less stable without them in it, less grounded, less permanent. Nothing lasts forever, that old cliché, is unfortunately steadfast in its truth. If only Zumthor and Michael Govan could erect an institution to store those moments in perpetuity, a new Library of Alexandria for interpersonal connections. In the meantime, I am reminded of the final lines of Philip Larkin’s poem “The Mower,” in which the speaker inadvertently kills a hedgehog while cutting his grass: “we should be careful / Of each other, we should be kind / While there is still time.”